The difference here is how the existence of that excess credit was justified. The model says you can create riskless investment positions, in which case, why not extend more credit? You've got the risk of default covered. As long as not too many people are doing that, you're actually in pretty good shape. When enough people are doing it, you end up with people shoring each other's absolutely safe investments up, a situation ripe for a chain reaction.
Another way of looking at this is that three out of ten of the top causes of death worldwide are classes of infectious diseases that can spread from person to person: respiratory infection, diarrhoeal diseases, and tuberculosis. TB, the smallest of the three, kills something like 1.3 million people/year -- probably more in one year than terrorism has killed in all time.
Of course deaths/year isn't the right metric for where we should put our attention and money. The best metric would be *preventable* deaths/year. You're over two hundred times more likely to die from a mistake in hospital care than you are from terrorism, and that's preventable. Infectious diseases are often preventable through hygiene and surveillance. We spend 8.8 billion dollars on the Centers for Disease Control every year, as opposed to 59 billion on Homeland security; which do you think provides the biggest bang for the buck in terms of lives saved?
You don't want to be lackadaisical about a viral pathogen like Monkey Pox that already has the capability (albeit weak) of spreading from human to human because mutation can cause a strain to be more infectious than expected.
Kind of like the last Star Trek film, where they made computer generated tracking shots of space ships look like they were filmed through really grubby lenses. That was genius, IMHO. Computer generated imagery has got so detailed that nothing impresses us now, but somehow adding the illusion that a camera was involved makes the shot feel more real.
I am an professional with many years of experience with relational databases, and I recently did a thorough review of Base for a client. The client needed a file-based database management system that could be easily deployed to casual users who would only be connected to the Internet occasionally. After spending a solid week studying Base and putting it through its paces, I reluctantly recommended MS Access, a product which I loathe which would limit the customer to Windows only.
I can say without reservation that the only "database" system I've seen that was worse than Base was ACIUS 4th Dimension.
What's wrong with Base? Three things.
(1) It uses HSQL -- good, but doesn't include all the jars -- bad. In effect is uses and *undocumented subset* of HSQL, and many key features like using java method calls for triggers simply don't work, even through a database console window.
(2) There is no reference documentation. There is no way to know what Base is supposed to do and how it is supposed to act; there's only walk-throughs and how tos. Those are valuable of course, but no substitute for fundamental documentation of what the product's capabilities are and how the product is supposed to behave. Without real documentation the utility of Base is largely limited to the kinds of "catalog your CD collection" toy examples in the documentation, despite having (a randomly chosen subset of) quite a powerful relational engine under the covers.
(3) The report writer GUI makes simple things like putting fields and text where you want them so difficult and fiddly it's physically painful to use because of the frustration involved -- and there's no alternative to the GUI as there is in something like JasperReports.
Access wins over Base hands down, on either documentation or user interface -- take your pick. The one clear lead that Base should have -- using HSQL instead of Jet -- is nullified by shipping a bastardized and undocumented subset of HSQL.
Base is nowhere near as robust as the rest of the OpenOffice suite; in fact I'd say it's so amateurish that it's a positive embarrassment. How they could ship something that poorly managed and implemented along with the rest of the suite is beyond me.
That's not the right way to look at this. You can't call the facilitator having consulted for Microsoft a "conflict of interest" without that applying equally to someone who benefits from the adoption of truly open standards.
The problem here is that Dr. Hopkirk didn't *disclose* his ties to Microsoft. I give Dr. Hopkirk the benefit of the doubt that he attempted to steer the roundtable impartially -- to the best of his knowledge. But he concealed information that was important for *other* people to make an *independent* assessment of his impartiality. That was deceptive.
So the question is who did Dr. Hopkirk deceive, the people he was trying to help, or himself? Surely it must be himself, because had he been thinking clearly he would have anticipated someone connecting the conflict-of-interest dots. Consider this blog entry from Dr. Hopkirk (http://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/An-insiders-view-on-the-government-open-standards-consultation):
By way of clarification and noting that I maintain a strict firewall between the different activities I am engaged in...
Do you find Dr. Hopkirk's claim to have erected firewalls *within his own mind* at all convincing? More to the point would you expect *anyone* concerned with conflict of interest in this case to be reassured by this claim? This statement is so provocatively absurd, that it can only be the product of self-deception. People are prepared to believe all kinds of ridiculous things about themselves, like "my intentions are good, therefore I can do no wrong."
First point: the Vatican has its own law (canon law) which everyone is supposed to follow, despite the monarchical form of government everyone is supposed to follow. So it is possible for somebody to be a whistlblower, although that itself is a crime under canon law. That's why the clergy sex abuse scandal went on so long. Canon law precludes doing anything that would bring disrepute upon the church, which is why pedophiles weren't turned over to the police.
Second point: one of the people they are looking for is a person who suggested that the Vatican has more information about the 1983 disappearance of two fifteen year-old girls who held dual Italian-Vatican citizenship. That makes this an international incident. Their disappearance happened during a dispute between Italian organized crime and the Vatican bank. The mob had been laundering money through Banco Ambrosiano, an Italian bank in which the Vatican bank had controlling interest (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Calvi#The_Banco_Ambrosiano_scandal). The implication is that the girls were kidnapped to put pressure on the Vatican to make good the Mafia's losses.
That sounds a bit Dan Browne, but after he was killed in a mob hit, an Italian gangster named Enrico de Pedis was granted burial in a Vatican basilica, an honor normally reserved for cardinals. The speculation is that this was a pay off for brokering a settlement between the Vatican bank and the mob.
The point is that it's not like the Vatican can operate in a vacuum. There are Italian interests involved here: Italian citizens, companies, and mobsters. The Banco Ambrosiano affair also involves the forgery of US securities.
however, during that same time period, the sea ice in the Antarctic, you know, at the other end of the planet, has been increasing. uh oh.
First of all, it's important that people know what "sea ice" is and its not. It *is* frozen sea water, which in the Antarctic mostly melts in the summer. It is *not* the permanent Antarctic ice sheets, which originate in glaciers (land ice, not sea ice, even though it is on the sea). The ice sheets are losing about 40 gigtons of mass per year[5].
Second, the gain in sea ice in the Antarctic is tiny, and it is not the result of atmospheric temperature decreases. There has been an increase in Antarctic atmosphere temperatures [1], accompanied by a stronger winds blowing cold surface water to the northwest which produces the increase in winter sea ice extent [2]. In the lee of the Antarctic Peninsula, which blocks this surface movement, there has been a dramatic decrease in sea ice [3]. Another factor is that slightly warmer surface temperatures can actually lead to an increase in ice extent by reducing the salinity of water near the edge of ice-formation[6].
Overall, the changes in polar sea ice are consistent with models predicting CO2 induced global warming [2][4], and in any case land ice is a much better indication of antarctic temperature changes, and that has being lost; if the small sea ice increases we've been seeing were due to cooling, we would see an equilibrium or gain in land ice.
CBT -- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is essentially mind hacking. Suppose you're afraid of snakes. In the old-style Freudian therapy you and your analyst would try to figure out how your childhood development led to that phobia. The CBT therapist isn't interested in where the phobia comes from, he's focused on how it works. He'll help you identify the unspoken assumptions and distorted thinking (that the cognitive part) that maintain your fear of snakes, then encourages you to put those ideas to the test by actually getting firsthand experience handling them (that's the behavioral part).
So the CBT approach is to break a mental problem down to its component assumptions and put each of those assumptions to an empirical test.
There's a similar therapy called "ACT" (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy). If your problem is that you think life sucks, a CBT therapist will approach that belief as a fallacy to be disproven. An ACT therapist would regard that feeling as part of the human condition that can't be banished, and focus on helping you learn to do rewarding and meaningful things despite feeling that way.
I've heard exactly this position from a local imam (a liberal Turkish Sunni and Sufi too). People associate "old time religion" with whatever their local cultural traditions are.
Same thing happened with Christianity in the Middle Ages.
I've had the opposite experience. I've got CFLs thoughout my house and while a couple of off-brand bulbs failed right away, the majority of the bulbs I've bought never failed, not in five years of use. I've been replacing them because their output has dropped and their color temperature has shifted.
I happen to prefer a cooler light, in the 5500K range, which you can't get in an incandescent.
I'm guessing you purchased lower quality bulbs, or have bad electricity, or perhaps high ambient temperatures.
I made no such claim. I posed a hypothetical scenario where we accept the proposition that missile defense increases the likelihood that Russia launches a first strike, in order to critique the notion that you can call *any* weapon system good or evil based on whether it is offensive or defensive.
In other words you are getting all worked up over the premise of a reductio ad absurdum argument.
Obviously you aren't reading very carefully, since you failed to notice that I am the same person who wrote the original post you objected to.
This whole "defensive==good, offensive==bad" assumption is ridiculous. You can't separate one from the other.
Let's say your country is threatened by another country with nukes. You obtain your own nukes and delivery systems, which are *offensive*, but they accomplish a defensive goal: to prevent an attack. Now let's say you've got your MAD scenario going, and you somehow obtain completely effective missile defense. You have now gained an *offensive* capability: the ability to strike without fear of consequences.
So in strategy, you can't separate offense and defense, at least so far as saying defensive weapons are automatically benign and offensive weapons are automatically evil. You have to look at the state of affairs before and after acquiring the weapons in question.
Let's examine the assumption that missile defense is evil, because it destabilizes the strategic situation; Russia is more likely to choose to shoot first because it's use it or lose it. Fair enough, but does that mean boost phase anti-missile capability is destabilizing? Not necessarily. Arguably it reduces the incentive for a country like Iran to obtain a small nuclear arsenal and the associated delivery systems, because the political losses won't be offset by strategic gains.
That of course assumes you've got other means of delivering nuclear weapons covered: commercial shipping, drone boats (like drug dealers use), even commercial airliners. The problem with strategy is that opponents don't just give up when you block one avenue of attack.
Yes, it is price discrimination, but there's at least a defensible reason for it: it provides poor people access to textbooks they wouldn't have otherwise. Free markets are about the efficient distribution of goods; but while efficiency is important, it is not the only priority we should have.
Which of course says nothing about whether what this person did was legal or not.
There's a really simple solution to this; Thailand could make it illegal to obtain textbooks with the intent to sell them overseas. Then the importer would not have a proper title to the books. As a sovereign nation Thailand can regulate commerce within its borders according to its national interest. If Thailand does not see doing that as in its national interests, then I fail to see why we should twist our copyright law to accomplish that for them.
Yes, we all know that publishers create strict arrangements with their distributors which limit where those distributors can resell the books. The question is whether those private arrangements are binding on people who aren't party to the agreement.
Everything you say is true, but beside the point. You seem to be asserting that if a company works really hard toward some goal that somehow it is the role of the law to prevent others from doing things that undermine that goal. While I can certainly understand the frustration of the publishers in this case, I don't see why having a book printed overseas should have any effect on somebody's right to dispose of it as his property.
Well I call bullshit on your calling bullshit on my bullshit.
NOAA's hurricane outlook is not "predicting the weather". They didn't attempt to predict a single storm, and in fact they make an explicit disclaimer that they don't predict landfalls. If you don't predict landfalls you can't possibly predict weather anywhere. What NOAA actually does is predict the general character of a season, and they've been remarkably good at that considering they do it six months in advance.
Choosing the last five years is not cherry picking, it reflects the current state of climate science. If you take the history of predictions to back before NOAA had computers, of course their batting average drops. You're comparing methodological apples and oranges. That the predictions agree better with computing power is actually a vindication of the underlying model of climate.
Now, as to your source for the chimpanzee claim, note that they promise to let us know who did better, the chimp or NOAA. That was in 2010 and they still haven't followed through. Guess why? Do you think the fact that the 2010 season prediction was smack in the middle of NOAAs predicted range but well above the random prediction might have anything to do with that?
Look at how the video makes its claims in very certain terms, but doesn't explain their basis or indeed cite any data or sources at all. But the people that made this video *did* go through the trouble of hiring a chimp trainer though. Why? Because they knew a lot of people would find a chimpanzee in a lab coat convincing and wouldn't be interested in any actual facts. I'm surprised you have the chutzpah to link to such an obvious piece of propaganda.
In any case, their claim is mathematically stupid. If you examine their method (throwing two dice), the chimp is going to predict on average 7 hurricanes per year. That falls into NOAA's category of an "above normal season", 6-15. So essentially their chimp would tend to predict slightly more severe seasons than the historic average, which is a pretty safe bet under AGW.
As for the 1972 report you cite, the gist of your point seems to be that changing your opinion when more facts come to light is somehow dishonest. The papers published 1970s give us a good picture of what was going on. At the start of the decade the direction of climate change was still an open question. During the 70s researchers examined the question and saw warming almost everywhere they looked. This was well before AGW was on anyone's political radar screen.
Also in the 1970s these same climatologists were claiming that the ice age was right around the corner.
I'm old enough to remember the 1970s, and I call bullshit. I'm not saying there might not have been some paper published in the 70s predicting an ice age, but I just did a literature search for the decade and found lots of papers predicting AGW and none predicting an ice age. If we presume such papers probably existed, the ratio of AGW to ice age papers had to be something like 20:1 or greater.
*In fact*, there are a number of papers from the mid 1950s discussing AGW, like this 1955 paper, from which I'll quote:
The extra CO2 released into the atmosphere by industrial processes and other human activities may have caused the temperature rise during the present century. In contrast with other theories of climate, the CO2 theory predicts that this warming trend will continue, at least for several centuries.
So this notion that AGW was something ginned up by political liberals in the 1980s to funnel money to their scientist friends is a lie. The AGW hypothesis originated during the Eisenhower Administration.
You didn't even bother the check, did you? You just *repeated* propaganda as if it were fact, even though it'd take only five minutes with Google to determine that it was total BS. This is exactly the problem the climate scientists are talking about. So many people are too lazy to check facts or think for themselves that a liar with a big pot of money is unbeatable in the court of public opinion.
But every year the Hurricane people have said that there would be X hurricanes this year; yet nearly every year they were very wrong.
I call bullshit again. Let's look at the last five years of data, shall we?
2011: In May NOAA predicts 6-10 hurricanes. Actual number: 7 2010: In May NOAA predicts 8-14 hurricanes. Actual number: 12. 2009: In May NOAA predicts 4-7 hurricanes. Actual number: 6. 2008: In May NOAA predicts 6-9 hurricanes. Actual number:8 2007: In May NOAA predicts 7-10 hurricanes. Actual number: 6
So NOAA's numerical predictions over the last five years are correct 80% of the time. They missed just once, but just by a hair. Their predictions of the character of the season (active or quite, number of major hurricanes) is remarkably good, considering that they're talking about weather six months in advance.
Again it took me less than five minutes to check your facts for you. If you can't be bothered to do that, you should STFU.
In a way it's worse than if they actually gave specific orders. They gave vague orders to enlisted personnel not trained to carry out those duties. As GP points out, the result was predictable. The immediate effect was the same as giving an illegal order, but allowed the officers to escape responsibility for the consequences.
All you have to know is that officers running the prison allowed falsified reports to be filed on the death of prisoners being tortured. That shows that they at least suspected that the way they were running the prison was illegal, and they didn't want anyone else to know.
This disagreement is really just a quibble. What is usually meant by "creationism" is the belief in the historical truth of Genesis. By that definition the Catholic is certainly not creationist. I once knew a guy at MIT who joined the Jesuits and became the head of the Vatican observatory. I've followed his career over the years and he's often invited by the press and media to comment on a variety of science questions, and creationism. He regards creationism essentially as crypto-paganism.
Now if you choose to re-define "creationism" as believing that the universe was created by God, then the Catholic Church's beliefs would certainly qualify. However that is an intrinsically untestable hypothesis (a positivist would claim is is meaningless), and therefore neither contradicts nor agrees with science. Creationism in its usual sense disagrees with science.
I think it is often not error per se that is destructive, it is the quixotic impulse to *correct error in others*. That impulse to try can turn any belief, even *justifiable*. belief, into something harmful.
The problem with self-righteousness is that it leads to faulty, emotion-driven reasoning. As the emotional temperature of a disagreement increases, confirmation bias kicks in, along with straw man arguments and cherry picking of evidence on both sides. The disagreement is no longer confined to its rational scope because we're no longer looking for truth, we're looking for ammunition.
The plain fact is that appointing yourself the corrector of other people's erroneous belief is stupid. It's madness to think you can confront other people that way and expect them to react with open-mindedness. What you will do is provoke a defensive response, and then a counter-examination of your *own* belief and behavior. Since none of us really deduces everything we believe, or fully considers the morality of every one of our actions, the people we are presuming to correct will have plenty of ammunition.
And when our beliefs and behavior are attacked, will *we* react rationally? How often have you seen somebody react to a counter-charge of hypocrisy by saying, "you know, you've got a point there, I should do better," ? Of *course* we react irrationally to other people's defensive counter-attacks on us.
Some people seem to think "tolerance" means saying every belief is equally true, or every act equally justifiable. No. What tolerance means is putting a lid on our emotional, knee-jerk reactions to what other people think. Doing that enables us to restrict the scope of the disagreement to the issue at hand. Giving our self-righteous impulses reign escalates a disagreement into a pissing match in which each side strives to demonize the other while painting itself as victim.
Slashdot Mirror
... when it is installed in a flying car.
A candle burns hotter than a person? How did they find that out? Burn the test subject in a calorimeter?
The difference here is how the existence of that excess credit was justified. The model says you can create riskless investment positions, in which case, why not extend more credit? You've got the risk of default covered. As long as not too many people are doing that, you're actually in pretty good shape. When enough people are doing it, you end up with people shoring each other's absolutely safe investments up, a situation ripe for a chain reaction.
Another way of looking at this is that three out of ten of the top causes of death worldwide are classes of infectious diseases that can spread from person to person: respiratory infection, diarrhoeal diseases, and tuberculosis. TB, the smallest of the three, kills something like 1.3 million people/year -- probably more in one year than terrorism has killed in all time.
Of course deaths/year isn't the right metric for where we should put our attention and money. The best metric would be *preventable* deaths/year. You're over two hundred times more likely to die from a mistake in hospital care than you are from terrorism, and that's preventable. Infectious diseases are often preventable through hygiene and surveillance. We spend 8.8 billion dollars on the Centers for Disease Control every year, as opposed to 59 billion on Homeland security; which do you think provides the biggest bang for the buck in terms of lives saved?
You don't want to be lackadaisical about a viral pathogen like Monkey Pox that already has the capability (albeit weak) of spreading from human to human because mutation can cause a strain to be more infectious than expected.
Kind of like the last Star Trek film, where they made computer generated tracking shots of space ships look like they were filmed through really grubby lenses. That was genius, IMHO. Computer generated imagery has got so detailed that nothing impresses us now, but somehow adding the illusion that a camera was involved makes the shot feel more real.
I am an professional with many years of experience with relational databases, and I recently did a thorough review of Base for a client. The client needed a file-based database management system that could be easily deployed to casual users who would only be connected to the Internet occasionally. After spending a solid week studying Base and putting it through its paces, I reluctantly recommended MS Access, a product which I loathe which would limit the customer to Windows only.
I can say without reservation that the only "database" system I've seen that was worse than Base was ACIUS 4th Dimension.
What's wrong with Base? Three things.
(1) It uses HSQL -- good, but doesn't include all the jars -- bad. In effect is uses and *undocumented subset* of HSQL, and many key features like using java method calls for triggers simply don't work, even through a database console window.
(2) There is no reference documentation. There is no way to know what Base is supposed to do and how it is supposed to act; there's only walk-throughs and how tos. Those are valuable of course, but no substitute for fundamental documentation of what the product's capabilities are and how the product is supposed to behave. Without real documentation the utility of Base is largely limited to the kinds of "catalog your CD collection" toy examples in the documentation, despite having (a randomly chosen subset of) quite a powerful relational engine under the covers.
(3) The report writer GUI makes simple things like putting fields and text where you want them so difficult and fiddly it's physically painful to use because of the frustration involved -- and there's no alternative to the GUI as there is in something like JasperReports.
Access wins over Base hands down, on either documentation or user interface -- take your pick. The one clear lead that Base should have -- using HSQL instead of Jet -- is nullified by shipping a bastardized and undocumented subset of HSQL.
Base is nowhere near as robust as the rest of the OpenOffice suite; in fact I'd say it's so amateurish that it's a positive embarrassment. How they could ship something that poorly managed and implemented along with the rest of the suite is beyond me.
I think it does, because the world *seriously* needs a decent alternative to MS Access and neither OO nor LO have it.
That's not the right way to look at this. You can't call the facilitator having consulted for Microsoft a "conflict of interest" without that applying equally to someone who benefits from the adoption of truly open standards.
The problem here is that Dr. Hopkirk didn't *disclose* his ties to Microsoft. I give Dr. Hopkirk the benefit of the doubt that he attempted to steer the roundtable impartially -- to the best of his knowledge. But he concealed information that was important for *other* people to make an *independent* assessment of his impartiality. That was deceptive.
So the question is who did Dr. Hopkirk deceive, the people he was trying to help, or himself? Surely it must be himself, because had he been thinking clearly he would have anticipated someone connecting the conflict-of-interest dots. Consider this blog entry from Dr. Hopkirk (http://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/An-insiders-view-on-the-government-open-standards-consultation):
By way of clarification and noting that I maintain a strict firewall between the different activities I am engaged in ...
Do you find Dr. Hopkirk's claim to have erected firewalls *within his own mind* at all convincing? More to the point would you expect *anyone* concerned with conflict of interest in this case to be reassured by this claim? This statement is so provocatively absurd, that it can only be the product of self-deception. People are prepared to believe all kinds of ridiculous things about themselves, like "my intentions are good, therefore I can do no wrong."
would decrease belief in the methodology used in this study. Did anybody *read* the linked press release from UBC?
First point: the Vatican has its own law (canon law) which everyone is supposed to follow, despite the monarchical form of government everyone is supposed to follow. So it is possible for somebody to be a whistlblower, although that itself is a crime under canon law. That's why the clergy sex abuse scandal went on so long. Canon law precludes doing anything that would bring disrepute upon the church, which is why pedophiles weren't turned over to the police.
Second point: one of the people they are looking for is a person who suggested that the Vatican has more information about the 1983 disappearance of two fifteen year-old girls who held dual Italian-Vatican citizenship. That makes this an international incident. Their disappearance happened during a dispute between Italian organized crime and the Vatican bank. The mob had been laundering money through Banco Ambrosiano, an Italian bank in which the Vatican bank had controlling interest (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Calvi#The_Banco_Ambrosiano_scandal). The implication is that the girls were kidnapped to put pressure on the Vatican to make good the Mafia's losses.
That sounds a bit Dan Browne, but after he was killed in a mob hit, an Italian gangster named Enrico de Pedis was granted burial in a Vatican basilica, an honor normally reserved for cardinals. The speculation is that this was a pay off for brokering a settlement between the Vatican bank and the mob.
The point is that it's not like the Vatican can operate in a vacuum. There are Italian interests involved here: Italian citizens, companies, and mobsters. The Banco Ambrosiano affair also involves the forgery of US securities.
however, during that same time period, the sea ice in the Antarctic, you know, at the other end of the planet, has been increasing. uh oh.
First of all, it's important that people know what "sea ice" is and its not. It *is* frozen sea water, which in the Antarctic mostly melts in the summer. It is *not* the permanent Antarctic ice sheets, which originate in glaciers (land ice, not sea ice, even though it is on the sea). The ice sheets are losing about 40 gigtons of mass per year[5].
Second, the gain in sea ice in the Antarctic is tiny, and it is not the result of atmospheric temperature decreases. There has been an increase in Antarctic atmosphere temperatures [1], accompanied by a stronger winds blowing cold surface water to the northwest which produces the increase in winter sea ice extent [2]. In the lee of the Antarctic Peninsula, which blocks this surface movement, there has been a dramatic decrease in sea ice [3]. Another factor is that slightly warmer surface temperatures can actually lead to an increase in ice extent by reducing the salinity of water near the edge of ice-formation[6].
Overall, the changes in polar sea ice are consistent with models predicting CO2 induced global warming [2][4], and in any case land ice is a much better indication of antarctic temperature changes, and that has being lost; if the small sea ice increases we've been seeing were due to cooling, we would see an equilibrium or gain in land ice.
CITATIONS:
[1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v457/n7228/abs/nature07669.html
[2] http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/faq/#wintertimeantarctic
[3] http://nsidc.org/cryosphere/quickfacts/seaice.html
[4] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/278/5340/1104.short
[5] http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010EGUGA..12.6127I
[6] http://psc.apl.washington.edu/zhang/Pubs/Zhang_Antarctic_20-11-2515.pdf
CBT -- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is essentially mind hacking. Suppose you're afraid of snakes. In the old-style Freudian therapy you and your analyst would try to figure out how your childhood development led to that phobia. The CBT therapist isn't interested in where the phobia comes from, he's focused on how it works. He'll help you identify the unspoken assumptions and distorted thinking (that the cognitive part) that maintain your fear of snakes, then encourages you to put those ideas to the test by actually getting firsthand experience handling them (that's the behavioral part).
So the CBT approach is to break a mental problem down to its component assumptions and put each of those assumptions to an empirical test.
There's a similar therapy called "ACT" (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy). If your problem is that you think life sucks, a CBT therapist will approach that belief as a fallacy to be disproven. An ACT therapist would regard that feeling as part of the human condition that can't be banished, and focus on helping you learn to do rewarding and meaningful things despite feeling that way.
It's a cultural thing.
I've heard exactly this position from a local imam (a liberal Turkish Sunni and Sufi too). People associate "old time religion" with whatever their local cultural traditions are.
Same thing happened with Christianity in the Middle Ages.
I've had the opposite experience. I've got CFLs thoughout my house and while a couple of off-brand bulbs failed right away, the majority of the bulbs I've bought never failed, not in five years of use. I've been replacing them because their output has dropped and their color temperature has shifted.
I happen to prefer a cooler light, in the 5500K range, which you can't get in an incandescent.
I'm guessing you purchased lower quality bulbs, or have bad electricity, or perhaps high ambient temperatures.
So I noticed. But to be fair, they did *something* and congress did *nothing*, so they're justified in giving themselves at least an C.
I made no such claim. I posed a hypothetical scenario where we accept the proposition that missile defense increases the likelihood that Russia launches a first strike, in order to critique the notion that you can call *any* weapon system good or evil based on whether it is offensive or defensive.
In other words you are getting all worked up over the premise of a reductio ad absurdum argument.
Obviously you aren't reading very carefully, since you failed to notice that I am the same person who wrote the original post you objected to.
Congratulation, you are an idiot. Or American patriot of the idiotic kind.
Or somebody who knows how to think, which means being able to consider a position he doesn't necessarily agree with.
This whole "defensive==good, offensive==bad" assumption is ridiculous. You can't separate one from the other.
Let's say your country is threatened by another country with nukes. You obtain your own nukes and delivery systems, which are *offensive*, but they accomplish a defensive goal: to prevent an attack. Now let's say you've got your MAD scenario going, and you somehow obtain completely effective missile defense. You have now gained an *offensive* capability: the ability to strike without fear of consequences.
So in strategy, you can't separate offense and defense, at least so far as saying defensive weapons are automatically benign and offensive weapons are automatically evil. You have to look at the state of affairs before and after acquiring the weapons in question.
Let's examine the assumption that missile defense is evil, because it destabilizes the strategic situation; Russia is more likely to choose to shoot first because it's use it or lose it. Fair enough, but does that mean boost phase anti-missile capability is destabilizing? Not necessarily. Arguably it reduces the incentive for a country like Iran to obtain a small nuclear arsenal and the associated delivery systems, because the political losses won't be offset by strategic gains.
That of course assumes you've got other means of delivering nuclear weapons covered: commercial shipping, drone boats (like drug dealers use), even commercial airliners. The problem with strategy is that opponents don't just give up when you block one avenue of attack.
Yes, it is price discrimination, but there's at least a defensible reason for it: it provides poor people access to textbooks they wouldn't have otherwise. Free markets are about the efficient distribution of goods; but while efficiency is important, it is not the only priority we should have.
Which of course says nothing about whether what this person did was legal or not.
There's a really simple solution to this; Thailand could make it illegal to obtain textbooks with the intent to sell them overseas. Then the importer would not have a proper title to the books. As a sovereign nation Thailand can regulate commerce within its borders according to its national interest. If Thailand does not see doing that as in its national interests, then I fail to see why we should twist our copyright law to accomplish that for them.
Yes, we all know that publishers create strict arrangements with their distributors which limit where those distributors can resell the books. The question is whether those private arrangements are binding on people who aren't party to the agreement.
Everything you say is true, but beside the point. You seem to be asserting that if a company works really hard toward some goal that somehow it is the role of the law to prevent others from doing things that undermine that goal. While I can certainly understand the frustration of the publishers in this case, I don't see why having a book printed overseas should have any effect on somebody's right to dispose of it as his property.
Well I call bullshit on your calling bullshit on my bullshit.
NOAA's hurricane outlook is not "predicting the weather". They didn't attempt to predict a single storm, and in fact they make an explicit disclaimer that they don't predict landfalls. If you don't predict landfalls you can't possibly predict weather anywhere. What NOAA actually does is predict the general character of a season, and they've been remarkably good at that considering they do it six months in advance.
Choosing the last five years is not cherry picking, it reflects the current state of climate science. If you take the history of predictions to back before NOAA had computers, of course their batting average drops. You're comparing methodological apples and oranges. That the predictions agree better with computing power is actually a vindication of the underlying model of climate.
Now, as to your source for the chimpanzee claim, note that they promise to let us know who did better, the chimp or NOAA. That was in 2010 and they still haven't followed through. Guess why? Do you think the fact that the 2010 season prediction was smack in the middle of NOAAs predicted range but well above the random prediction might have anything to do with that?
Look at how the video makes its claims in very certain terms, but doesn't explain their basis or indeed cite any data or sources at all. But the people that made this video *did* go through the trouble of hiring a chimp trainer though. Why? Because they knew a lot of people would find a chimpanzee in a lab coat convincing and wouldn't be interested in any actual facts. I'm surprised you have the chutzpah to link to such an obvious piece of propaganda.
In any case, their claim is mathematically stupid. If you examine their method (throwing two dice), the chimp is going to predict on average 7 hurricanes per year. That falls into NOAA's category of an "above normal season", 6-15. So essentially their chimp would tend to predict slightly more severe seasons than the historic average, which is a pretty safe bet under AGW.
As for the 1972 report you cite, the gist of your point seems to be that changing your opinion when more facts come to light is somehow dishonest. The papers published 1970s give us a good picture of what was going on. At the start of the decade the direction of climate change was still an open question. During the 70s researchers examined the question and saw warming almost everywhere they looked. This was well before AGW was on anyone's political radar screen.
Also in the 1970s these same climatologists were claiming that the ice age was right around the corner.
I'm old enough to remember the 1970s, and I call bullshit. I'm not saying there might not have been some paper published in the 70s predicting an ice age, but I just did a literature search for the decade and found lots of papers predicting AGW and none predicting an ice age. If we presume such papers probably existed, the ratio of AGW to ice age papers had to be something like 20:1 or greater.
*In fact*, there are a number of papers from the mid 1950s discussing AGW, like this 1955 paper, from which I'll quote:
The extra CO2 released into the atmosphere by industrial processes and other human activities may have caused the temperature rise during the present century. In contrast with other theories of climate, the CO2 theory predicts that this warming trend will continue, at least for several centuries.
So this notion that AGW was something ginned up by political liberals in the 1980s to funnel money to their scientist friends is a lie. The AGW hypothesis originated during the Eisenhower Administration.
You didn't even bother the check, did you? You just *repeated* propaganda as if it were fact, even though it'd take only five minutes with Google to determine that it was total BS. This is exactly the problem the climate scientists are talking about. So many people are too lazy to check facts or think for themselves that a liar with a big pot of money is unbeatable in the court of public opinion.
But every year the Hurricane people have said that there would be X hurricanes this year; yet nearly every year they were very wrong.
I call bullshit again. Let's look at the last five years of data, shall we?
2011: In May NOAA predicts 6-10 hurricanes. Actual number: 7
2010: In May NOAA predicts 8-14 hurricanes. Actual number: 12.
2009: In May NOAA predicts 4-7 hurricanes. Actual number: 6.
2008: In May NOAA predicts 6-9 hurricanes. Actual number:8
2007: In May NOAA predicts 7-10 hurricanes. Actual number: 6
So NOAA's numerical predictions over the last five years are correct 80% of the time. They missed just once, but just by a hair. Their predictions of the character of the season (active or quite, number of major hurricanes) is remarkably good, considering that they're talking about weather six months in advance.
Again it took me less than five minutes to check your facts for you. If you can't be bothered to do that, you should STFU.
In a way it's worse than if they actually gave specific orders. They gave vague orders to enlisted personnel not trained to carry out those duties. As GP points out, the result was predictable. The immediate effect was the same as giving an illegal order, but allowed the officers to escape responsibility for the consequences.
All you have to know is that officers running the prison allowed falsified reports to be filed on the death of prisoners being tortured. That shows that they at least suspected that the way they were running the prison was illegal, and they didn't want anyone else to know.
This disagreement is really just a quibble. What is usually meant by "creationism" is the belief in the historical truth of Genesis. By that definition the Catholic is certainly not creationist. I once knew a guy at MIT who joined the Jesuits and became the head of the Vatican observatory. I've followed his career over the years and he's often invited by the press and media to comment on a variety of science questions, and creationism. He regards creationism essentially as crypto-paganism.
Now if you choose to re-define "creationism" as believing that the universe was created by God, then the Catholic Church's beliefs would certainly qualify. However that is an intrinsically untestable hypothesis (a positivist would claim is is meaningless), and therefore neither contradicts nor agrees with science. Creationism in its usual sense disagrees with science.
I think it is often not error per se that is destructive, it is the quixotic impulse to *correct error in others*. That impulse to try can turn any belief, even *justifiable*. belief, into something harmful.
The problem with self-righteousness is that it leads to faulty, emotion-driven reasoning. As the emotional temperature of a disagreement increases, confirmation bias kicks in, along with straw man arguments and cherry picking of evidence on both sides. The disagreement is no longer confined to its rational scope because we're no longer looking for truth, we're looking for ammunition.
The plain fact is that appointing yourself the corrector of other people's erroneous belief is stupid. It's madness to think you can confront other people that way and expect them to react with open-mindedness. What you will do is provoke a defensive response, and then a counter-examination of your *own* belief and behavior. Since none of us really deduces everything we believe, or fully considers the morality of every one of our actions, the people we are presuming to correct will have plenty of ammunition.
And when our beliefs and behavior are attacked, will *we* react rationally? How often have you seen somebody react to a counter-charge of hypocrisy by saying, "you know, you've got a point there, I should do better," ? Of *course* we react irrationally to other people's defensive counter-attacks on us.
Some people seem to think "tolerance" means saying every belief is equally true, or every act equally justifiable. No. What tolerance means is putting a lid on our emotional, knee-jerk reactions to what other people think. Doing that enables us to restrict the scope of the disagreement to the issue at hand. Giving our self-righteous impulses reign escalates a disagreement into a pissing match in which each side strives to demonize the other while painting itself as victim.